I am happy to announce that my research group at TU Graz has launched Bulltweetbingo!, a game-with-a-purpose based on Twitter, today. The game is already live and available at http://bingo.tugraz.at. For an introduction to the idea of Buzzword Bingo, please see the following IBM commercial (Youtube video).

IBM Innovation Buzzword Bingo (Youtube)

Rather than playing buzzword bingo while listening to a talk, the idea of Bulltweetbingo! is to play Buzzword Bingo with the people you follow on Twitter. All people you follow on Twitter automatically participate in the game by tweeting. A Bulltweetbingo game terminates (i.e. hits “Bingo!”) if the people you follow on Twitter use a particular combination of the defined buzzwords in their tweets. We intend to use the data provided by each game in our research on analzying the semantics of short messages on systems such as Twitter or Facebook. Each game provides information about the relevance and topics of tweets for a particular person as well as some information on the topics of tweets that a person expects to receive in the future.

I’m copy’n pasting some more information about the game that we have made available on the game website (about the project).

Bulltweetbingo!
Playing a game of bingo with people you follow on Twitter.

A team of researchers from Graz University of Technology, Austria has developed one of the first games-with-a-purpose that is exclusively based on Twitter.

The goal of this project is to annotate and to better understand the short messages posted to so-called social awareness streams such as Twitter or Facebook. Using this data, the researchers aim to improve the ability of computers to effectively organize and make sense out of the sea of short messages available today.

Dr. Markus Strohmaier, Assistant Professor at the Knowledge Management Institute at Graz University of Technology, Austria explains: “While social awareness streams such as Twitter or Facebook have experienced significant popularity over the last few years, we know little about how to best understand, search and organize the information that is contained in them.”

To tackle this problem, the researchers have developed a game of Buzzword Bingo that users can play with people they follow on Twitter.

“With each game users play on our website, we will collect data that helps us develop more effective algorithms for better understanding this new kind of data” Dr. Markus Strohmaier says, “and in addition to that, we simply hope users would enjoy playing a game of Bingo on Twitter. Each game is unique and exciting in a sense that users generally don’t know what tweets people will publish during the course of a bingo game”.

The researchers have launched the site bulltweetbingo! and ask users to sign up and to play a game of Bingo with the people they follow on Twitter. Twitter users can sign up at http://bingo.tugraz.at.

The game was implemented by one of my talented students, Simon Walk – Make sure to hire him if you need a complex web project to be realized quickly and effectively!

For centuries, taxonomies have been a tool for mankind to bring structure to the world. Taxonomies (wikipedia: “the practice and science of classification”) were developed in different fields of science, including – but not limited to – biology (e.g. taxonomies of animals) or library sciences (e.g. taxonomies of literature). Regardless of the particular domain of application, in most cases those taxonomies were developed by a selected few (e.g. librarians), and were used by many.

With the emergence of personal computers and file directories, the task of taxonomy development was brought to the masses. Suddenly everyone (i.e. every computer user) was in charge of developing, maintaining and transforming personal taxonomical structures in order to organize and (re-)find resources. While this development has led to a vast increase of personal taxonomies, it was only since del.icio.us has popularized tagging as a new form of resource organization that users’ personal taxonomies were exposed publicly. This has made it possible to aggregate a large number of personal taxonomies into collective taxonomic structures. The result of such aggregation has since then been refered to as folksonomies, i.e. an emergent structure collectively produced by a large number of users in a bottom-up manner.

In social awareness streams (pdf) such as Twitter of Facebook, users typically do not aim to classify or organize resources, but they engage in casual chatter and dialogue, ocassionally using syntax to coordinate communication (such as #hashtags or @replies). Taxonomic structures can be assumed to play a subordinate role for users of social awareness streams.

In a recent paper to be presented at the SemSearch Workshop at WWW2010 [1] however, we show that there exist latent conceptual structures – similar to taxonomies or folksonomies – in social awareness streams, and that we can acquire these structures through simple aggregation mechanisms.

Abstract: Although one might argue that little wisdom can be conveyed in messages of 140 characters or less, this paper sets out to explore whether the aggregation of messages in social awareness streams, such as Twitter, conveys meaningful information about a given domain. As a research community, we know little about the structural and semantic properties of such streams, and how they can be analyzed, characterized and used. This paper introduces a network-theoretic model of social awareness streams, a so-called “tweetonomy”, together with a set of stream-based measures that allow researchers to systematically define and compare different stream aggregations. We apply the model and measures to a dataset acquired from Twitter to study emerging semantics in selected streams. The network-theoretic model and the corresponding measures introduced in this paper are relevant for researchers interested in information retrieval and ontology learning from social awareness streams. Our empirical findings demonstrate that different social awareness stream aggregations exhibit interesting differences, making them amenable for different applications [1].

In the paper, we introduce the notion of tweetonomies, and a corresponding tri-partite model of social awareness streams that extends the existing model of folksonomies by accomodating user-generated syntax (such as slashtags and other emerging syntax) and thereby integrating the communicative nature of such streams.

In the figure below, we have applied the network-theoretic model of tweetonomies to acquire a semantic network of hashtags that could be used for a range of different purposes, such as for navigating social awareness streams or for recommendation problems.

A tweetonomy of hashtags, aquired from Twitter (with the help of Jan Poeschko, click for full image 2.6 MB)

Our work shows that tweetonomies are a far more complex structure than – for example – taxonomies or folksonomies. One reason for that observation lies in the dynamic and user-generated nature of its syntax, but also in the fact that tweetonomies accomodate a much richer language than the language used in social tagging systems (tweets vs tags).

The results of our work suggest that tweetonomies are a novel and promising concept, different from taxonomies and folksonomies where people engage in conscious acts of classification. Whether tweetonomies have the potential to bring order and structure to social awareness streams similar to the way folksonomies brought order to social tagging systems remains a question to be answered.

Update (May 5 2010): An interesting question that was raised during the presentation of the paper at the WWW’2010 workshop was whether it would be justified to introduce Tweetonomies as a new concept. In other words, are the structures that we observe on twitter not just a different form of folksonomies? I’d argue for the necessity of a new concept for the following reasons: While taxonomies and folksonomies emerge when users structure resources, tweetonomies emerge when users structure conversation. Because conversations are inherently different than resources (e.g. they are dynamic, and involve multiple users) the structures that emerge from social awareness streams (tweetonomies) can be expected to be different from the structures that emerge from social bookmarking systems (folksonomies). Whether this is really the case however needs to be investigated in future work.

About me

Markus Strohmaier, Full Professor of Web-Science at the Faculty of Computer Science at University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany) and Scientific Director at GESIS - the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany).

My research focuses on the World Wide Web, my interests include social computation, agents, online production systems and crowdsourcing.